To:
(1) The Director of the ICE-SLCFO, and (2) Utah members of U.S. Congress Orrin Hatch, Michael Lee, Rob Bishop, Chris Stewart, John Curtis, and Mia Love

(1) ICE should cancel Vicky Chavez's (A#206-760827) deportation order and continue granting her deferrals until Congress creates a means for her to get legal status.
(2) Utah members of Congress should sponsor a bill that expands and updates the Refugee Act of 1980 and the asylum reform measures of 1995. I urge them to broaden the definition of "credible fear" for asylum seekers coming to the U.S to include those at the mercy of non-state actors (e.g., gangs and cartels) and women with children fleeing cultures of unchecked and systemic domestic violence, who are some of the most vulnerable members of our society.

Why is this important?

With her first daughter, Vicky made the arduous journey from Honduras to the U.S. border in 2014, after receiving death threats in Honduras from her daughter’s father. After following the international process for asylum at the border, she has petitioned the U.S. government for asylum over and over, without ceasing, in order to win safety and legal residency in her new home, Utah, where the rest of her family lives. She has been fighting constantly to get legal asylum status, even while facing insufficient legal representation and an immigration court system that arbitrarily denies most asylum seekers.

Vicky has never given up. Her current lawyer has filed to reopen her asylum case. She has no criminal record. Vicky has reconnected and reunited with the rest of her immediate family here in Utah. She had a second, beautiful daughter in 2017, and her family and friends have given her unconditional love and support as she raises her family in her new community. But in 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) decided they couldn’t leave this mother in peace to raise her girls and gain permanent status in the U.S. They decided she just had to be deported.

If Vicky were sent back to Honduras, her life and the lives of her daughters would be in danger. So on January 30, 2018, mere hours before her flight to Honduras, she took sanctuary at First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Women with children should be a protected class for asylum. Like Vicky, victims of domestic violence in Honduras and similar countries have no recourse for getting relief; the Honduran government cannot or will not intervene against their abusers or the organized exploitation of women and children, which practically guarantees systemic endangerment of women and children.

Honduras is on the brink of civil war. Election fraud and lack of confidence in the legitimacy of the Honduran government have frayed its ability to provide basic services or protect its citizens from the local systems of control that have developed in the vacuum of a weak central government. The country's security force has gained power due to U.S. prosecution of the international war on drugs, has committed widespread human rights abuses, and has enabled the formation of warring gangs. Women and children can find no social safety in these circumstances.

The current U.S. standards for asylum are inadequate and need to be updated: they do not protect the lives of people who have been displaced from their countries of origin by non-state violence and violence exacerbated by U.S. foreign policy.

I ask that you please cancel Vicky's deportation order and enable her asylum application to be successful. She needs to raise her girls in peace and stability, unafraid, surrounded by her family and friends in Utah, where she belongs.